Samsung's 8th-gen V-NAND is expected to support over 12 GB/s

AlphaX

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Something to look forward to: As companies attempt to squeeze every last bit of speed possible out of PCIe 4.0 SSDs, they've begun to focus on the newest standard, PCIe 5.0. While some manufacturers have reported 10+ GB/s capable drives, Samsung has attempted to overthrow all of its competition with its 8th-generation V-NAND.

Earlier this year, we covered Samsung's newest and fastest NVMe solid-state drive, the 990 PRO. The 990 PRO boasted speeds of "up to 7,450 MB/s," and reviews showed it to be one of the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs for consumers. The drive features Samsung's 7th-generation "V-NAND" flash. However, the company doesn't plan to use the 7th-gen chips for long.

In August, Samsung began the production phase for its upcoming 8th-generation V-NAND. At the time, the specifications were somewhat vague. In a more recent announcement, Samsung made the speeds of these new flash modules public, which are impressive.

Samsung's 8th-generation V-NAND features the expected 236 layers as well as supporting up to 2.4 GT/s, which equals to over 12 GB/s. Samsung claims that this is a 1.2x boost compared to the previous generation of its V-NAND.

The 8th-generation V-NAND also allows up to 128 GB on a single flash module, allowing it to pack even more storage space onto a drive. There is no available information on the capacity each 7th-generation V-NAND chip could support. However, Samsung does ensure that its 8th-generation V-NAND features "the industry's highest bit density."

We may see Samsung use this new NAND generation on PCIe 4.0 SSDs before using it on PCIe 5.0 SSDs. It could allow Samsung to break the 8 GB/s bandwidth limit of a PCIe 4.0 x4 slot, a feat not even the 990 PRO reached, coming approximately 550 MB/s short of the accomplishment.

There is no official release date for consumer drives featuring 8th-generation V-NAND. The first SSDs with the new technology will likely cater to enterprise usage, primarily for workspaces and servers. Though, consumer-grade SSDs with 8th-generation V-NAND should be right behind those workplace integrations.

Overall, this is an exciting time to be someone with a PCIe 5.0-supported computer. In a matter of months, you'll be able to take advantage of the fastest storage devices on the market. While Samsung may initially be "late to the party," its first PCIe 5.0 SSD will draw ample attention whenever it arrives.

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Is it exciting though? No talk of random performance increases. Huge sequential transfer speeds are largely irrelevant to normal use on your pc and if you looked at your own benchmarks, there has been no real improvement in real world testing for years. A good PCI-E 3 SSD offer barely slower performance in loading games and other software. All PCI-E 4 and no doubt PCI-E 5 too, has brought is higher temperatures, higher prices and the need for heat sinks to minimise throttling. Unless random IO's are improved at least 200% colour me whelmed at best.
 
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A good PCI-E 3 SSD offer barely slower performance in loading games and other software.
Came here to say this too. Without improvements to random performance, those new gen drives are worthless. It's literally a "GHz race" (or rather, GB/s race). And much like the Pentium Ds trying to push very high frequencies before Core 2 Duos whooped them running at half the clocks, those sequential speeds do nothing but trick people who think it boils down to "bigger advertised number = better".

The situation is so dire that, outside of top models like the SN850 and the 980 Pro, most PCIe 4.0 SSDs have actually regressed in random performance compared to old Silicon Motion-based PCIe 3.0 drives like the Adata SX8200 Pro and the HP EX900 series.
 
Samsung are no longer the standout they once were. Others have high speed 230+ layer v-nand too, others have cheaper products and same warranties. If you ca get them on sale at the same price as some other brands then they make sense.
 
As stated, I/O performance is everything. The ultimate goal which I hope to see in the next decade is unified memory. System memory and storage, all one medium.
 
With RAID 10 my speed is around 25 GBs. Anyway, in practice, I still don't notice the difference between one 980 Pro at 7 GBs and 4 in RAID 10. Fed up with Windows 11.
 
In fact, all these ridiculous attempts are nothing against the background of a stupor with performance growth in key 4k IOPs. The read speed of 4k IOPS for the best drives does not exceed 80-90Mb/s, or 100 times slower than linear speeds of SSD that are essentially useless to anyone.

The townsfolk also need to clearly understand that the speed of the SSD is limited by the bandwidth of the RAM, and it has grown (linearly) in 13(!) years by only 2-3(!) times - from ~21-23Gb/s to ~45-70Gb/s. And you already need at least 200Gb/s to serve requests from newest SSD and other high-speed devices (especially 8k monitors and USB 40 v2/TB5), I.e. right now, the speed of the RAM is around 3(!) times lower than the required minimum for comfort operations.

That is why processor manufacturers make such shameful "improvements" of processors as the growth of the L3 cache to values in the region up to 100MB and more. This is essentially the same attempt to deceive reality, like the "SLC cache" in an SSD, beyond which the write speed drops immediately by an order of magnitude.

Cheap chinese SSDs at a price of $100-200 for 2-4TB with 3D TLC already now allow the production of real 666GB-1333Gb (500Gb-1Tb for QLC NAND) SLC drives whose write speed is always stable and equal to the "SLC cache" on 3D TLC/QLC drives. SLC drives have 50000+ write cycles and long data save period without refresh "cold" data. People are simply blatantly deceived by manufacturers forgetting to tell buyers in the specifications about "SLC cache" and very low write speeds beyond it. Pure fraud.

But even SLC drives do not solve the key problem of NAND drives - the extremely low read and write speed of 4k IOPS (1Q1T) against the background of linear read speeds 100 times higher. It turns out that SSDs today have turned into a kind of HDD once...
 
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In fact, all these ridiculous attempts are nothing against the background of a stupor with performance growth in key 4k IOPs. The read speed of 4k IOPS for the best drives does not exceed 80-90Mb/s, or 100 times slower than linear speeds of SSD that are essentially useless to anyone.

The townsfolk also need to clearly understand that the speed of the SSD is limited by the bandwidth of the RAM, and it has grown (linearly) in 13(!) years by only 2-3(!) times - from ~21-23Gb/s to ~45-70Gb/s. And you already need at least 200Gb/s to serve requests from newest SSD and other high-speed devices (especially 8k monitors and USB 40 v2/TB5), I.e. right now, the speed of the RAM is around 3(!) times lower than the required minimum for comfort operations.

That is why processor manufacturers make such shameful "improvements" of processors as the growth of the L3 cache to values in the region up to 100MB and more. This is essentially the same attempt to deceive reality, like the "SLC cache" in an SSD, beyond which the write speed drops immediately by an order of magnitude.

Cheap chinese SSDs at a price of $100-200 for 2-4TB with 3D TLC already now allow the production of real 666GB-1250Gb (500Gb-1Tb for QLC NAND) SLC drives whose write speed is always stable and equal to the "SLC cache" on 3D TLC/QLC drives. SLC drives have 50000+ write cycles and long data save period without refresh "cold" data. People are simply blatantly deceived by manufacturers forgetting to tell buyers in the specifications about "SLC cache" and very low write speeds beyond it. Pure fraud.
This would explain why the boot time is practically the same in my case at 25 GBs (read) and 10 GBs (write). My speeds are only to brag with friends, because in practice it is all the same.
 
Is it exciting though? No talk of random performance increases. Huge sequential transfer speeds are largely irrelevant to normal use on your pc and if you looked at your own benchmarks, there has been no real improvement in real world testing for years. A good PCI-E 3 SSD offer barely slower performance in loading games and other software. All PCI-E 4 and no doubt PCI-E 5 too, has brought is higher temperatures, higher prices and the need for heat sinks to minimise throttling. Unless random IO's are improved at least 200% colour me whelmed at best.

There is no talk because the improvements are only for sequential reads and writes. And the limitation for random is the Flash memory itself. Until they move to something better you are not going to see much improvement there. The big numbers and the marketing fool the gamers and basic users. Since bigger numbers to them always mean better.
 
Samsung talking v8 NAND. Meanwhile v7 based 990 Pro that they showed ages ago is still not available...
 
All this crazy speed is great and all but how practical is it? Do we really NEED 12 gigabytes per second?
 
Read more about DirectStorage, I think soon we see games for PCIE 5.0

You should read about sequential vs random operations. Games will not benefit from those high sequential speeds because streaming assets with DirectStorage is not a sequential operation.

Same reason PCIe SSDs are advertised with numbers 10 times higher than SATA SSDs, but only perform less than twice as fast in games.
 
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